The Disaster Avoidance Expert

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Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. So if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. Today we're going to be talking about the why of Right Way to Do things the Right Way now. If you've not yet discovered your why, go to whyinstitute.com discover your why and then come back Because. This will have much more meaning for you when you know your why now. The why of Right Way now. If this is your why you believe that there is a proper and correct way to do things and that things should be done right, there's no point in skimping on details or cutting corners. To achieve success, you must follow procedures that have been proven and use systems that have been developed and shown to work over time and adjusted and corrected on numerous occasions to produce the right outcomes. You know that if you create structures and processes that work, the right results will follow. You believe in clarity and simplicity, operations that run smoothly because they have been tested. You generally show up on time because that's the right thing to do and appreciate it. When others respect a set schedule, you embrace order and instill it in your personal life and your business. You recognize that different departments in a business have different needs, yet there is always a right way to get things done, even if it is not your way and that part of true leadership is to bring that out in others. So today I've got a great guest for you that is exactly this why of Right Way. He is known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert. His name is Dr. Gleb Sipursky and he is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision making strategies via his consulting, coaching and training firm, Disaster Avoidance Experts. A cognitive neuroscientist and behavioral economist, Dr. Sipursky writes for Inc. Time and CNBC. A best selling author, his new book is available on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. Never go with your gut How Pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters Gleb, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much Gary. It's a pleasure to be invited to and talk about my why.

So how did you get involved with disaster avoidance? How did that happen for you?

Well actually that comes from when I was a kid when I saw my parents engage in many disasters, many disastrous decisions to be exact. They fought with each other quite a lot about whole minority of stupid things that even I as a kid saw were not things that you should fight about. And they fought over larger things when they both made bad decisions. They're both very gut oriented people. When they felt something was right that meant it was right and they often disagreed about what was right. The worst time was when my dad who's a real estate agent and so he had variable income because he worked in commission at one time he made quite a lot of money and he hid that money from my mom. He bought an apartment elsewhere and he rented it out for a couple of years and eventually my mom found out as people would do and that was bad. They had a big blowout fight. They had a lot of conflicts, a lot of tensions, a lot of stress with each other. They eventually separated over that and they were separated for quite a while. They got back together but she could never really trust them again. And as a kid that really shaped me. That really influenced my upbringing how I was thinking about things and that caused me to look at why do adults make such dumb decisions? Why do they do things in such the wrong ways that even I as a kid could see that. So that really shaped me and that influenced me to go on and study decision making. How do people make decisions? Another thing that actually influenced me, not only my parents, my family was one thing when so I was born in 81 I came of age and when I was 18 in 1999 when the dot coms were booming, webvan pets.com and so on, tech leaders were partying like it's 1999 for those who remember that Prince song. Then a couple of years later when I was 21, 2002 they all went bust. All of these companies went bust. People lost their life savings. So people who are heroes in 1999 and all the cities CNBC Inc. Wall Street Journal front page for great heroes of this age were now the zeros of this age and they were on the same cover pages for all the wrong reasons. Even worse was the discovery that people at Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, these top notch leaders hid their losses in the dot com bust through fraudulent accounting. And then they were caught and then a lot of Them went to jail and companies went bankrupt. Those leaders made terrible decisions. Very obvious that it would be discovered sooner or later, in year or two and so on, but they still made these decisions. So that caused me to understand that it wasn't only my parents. It's not only my parents. It's the biggest, most prominent people in our society who made these really bad decisions. And so I decided to study this topic. And I studied it. I became a consultant, coach, trainer. So I did that, and I also studied it formally. I went into academia because just the kind of knowledge that was available outside of academia wasn't sufficient. And so I researched this topic for 15 years in academia, became a cognitive neuroscientist and behavioral economist, studying how people make decisions and how to make the best decisions most effectively for whatever goals you want to achieve. And so that's where I am right now. And that's what I wrote my book about. Never go with your gut. How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters.

That is awesome. Now, now tell us, where are you from? Where did you grow up?

I grew up. Well, I'm from originally, I was born this small country called Moldova in Eastern Europe. And my parents made the really right decision this time to leave it when I was 10, in 1991, and we immigrated to the United States. So I grew up in New York City. New York City is home for me and I live.

Yeah, I was going to say. So you've been in the US since you were 10 years old?

That's right. That's exactly right. So since I was 10 years old. And gosh, it's 2019 right now. So I've spent already 28 years here in the United States and 10 years in Eastern Europe and Moldova before that.

That's my background.

There is a study then of how to make a decision, Is that right?

Yes, very much so. That's the cognitive neuroscience and specific subfield of cognitive neuroscience of decision making. So how do you make decisions? How do we make the bad decisions? And. And that has to do with what are called cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are judgment errors you can look at. There's a great deal of scholarship on this topic. I mean, you can look them up on Wikipedia if you don't have access to all the scholarly articles, which cost you $10 per article. If you don't have. If you're not a part of a university, so you don't probably don't want to pay that. Look at them up on wikipedia. There's over 100 of them. And they give a whole bunch of citations to academic articles about these topics. And this is how we make the errors that cause us to make really bad decisions. Now, more recently, we've been studying how do you actually overcome the errors? And that won't be on Wikipedia because it's too recent and too new. That's the science of debiasing, where we have cognitive biases. How do we actually fight the cognitive biases? That's what my book is about. What are the most effective debiasing strategies that we have to make bias? Better decisions, much better decisions compared to how we would do if we're just intuitively naturally going with our primitive gut reactions.

So take me through the process that most people use to make a bad decision, and then take us through the process of what the right way to make a decision.

So typical process that people use to make any decision is that they think about this decision and they feel about this decision. They perceive how do they feel about it? What are the various choices available and how do I feel about them? And then based on their feelings, they look at information that would confirm their feelings. Because if they feel about a choice a certain way, then it probably the right choice. So they look for information to support their idea that it's the right choice. And they usually find that information. Because if you're looking for something, you'll often find it, you know, if you look for information, let's say, if you want to decide on whether you should get married, people would look on Google for what are the best reasons to get married. If you frame your question that way, what kind of information, what kind of articles do you think will pop up to the top page? Or if you want to, let's say you're a business leader and you want to acquire another company, you would say, what are all the best reasons to make company acquisition? What kind of articles would float to the top of that one? So for all the same, whether in personal life or in professional life, people, people tend to feel a certain way and then look for information that confirms their feelings. Especially if it's an important decision. They tend to not ask other people. It might be surprising, but the more important the decision is, the less likely they are to talk to others or consider the opinions of others. They might perform or formally talk to others, but they'd really make the decision by themselves if they're the decision maker. And so then they go ahead and they make the decision, and they often fail. They often fall flat in their face. If you look at mergers and acquisitions, you'll see that about 80% of all mergers and acquisitions fail. Fail to create value for companies. They actually destroy value, unfortunately. And if you look at why is that? Yeah, same thing just for marriages, you'll see that a lot of them fail over just under 50%. 40 to 50% of people get divorced. So that's big problem. So what's the question about why do they fail? What specifically do you want to know?

So why. The bigger. The bigger the question, the less likely they are to seek counsel.

Because people tend to be. The bigger the question, the more they tend to trust themselves and distrust others. They tend to trust themselves more on bigger, more challenging questions. The biggest life questions. People tend to trust themselves more. Whereas in reality. I'll give you a really interesting study because the biggest questions are almost always the most complex questions. Whether you should get married or not. It's probably one of the most complex questions that you'll have to answer because there are an incredible number of factors whether to get married or not and then which person to get married to. Right. So that's a huge, huge, huge set of questions. It's very complex. Same thing for merchant acquisition. Do you do it or not? And which company do you merge or acquire? Very complex question defines the future of your whole company. And if we look at the complex questions and simple questions, we don't have to look at business leaders. We can look at someone whose outcomes are known. Doctors, medical doctors. So there was a really interesting study done on 118. Physicians were given sample case studies. And we knew the outcomes. We know outside what the actual outcomes of the case studies are. We what actual correct diagnosis is. And they were asked to give diagnosis based on symptoms. They were given simple cases and complex cases. On simple cases, they got them right 55% of the time. On complex cases, they got them right 6% of the time now. But the really interesting thing is the confidence. On simple cases. They were confident. Their confidence level was 7.2 out of 10 on complex cases, 72% confidence. On complex cases, their level of confidence was 64% out of 10, 6.4. So 64. And their accuracy rate was literally 90% lower for complex cases. So we tend to be greatly overconfident. And this is medical doctors. We know the outcomes. It's a much more hard thing to make the right decision on marriage or merger. It's very hard to know what the right outcome is. But we tend to be greatly overconfident about these things. And the more overconfident we are about something, the Less likely we are to trust and talk to others and the more likely we are to make the decision by ourselves. Overconfidence bias is one of the biggest, biggest cognitive biases out there. It causes us to make terrible decisions and unfortunately causes us in personal life and professional life.

So I have a question on that because I'm curious how much of asking questions to other people about big decisions is overconfidence or underconfidence and not wanting to share that you are underconfident or that you don't have an answer, or that, you know, why should I marry this person? Seems like I don't really want to share what I'm thinking. So I'm just not going to ask somebody because I don't know if I should really marry this person or not. I don't know if I should get married and I don't want anyone else to know that I don't know.

It might be different whatever happens with people, but there, the essential aspect is still overconfidence. They make the decision or they don't make the decision based on themselves being more confident in the correctness of the answer than is the case itself. They might be thinking what you're saying, that, hey, I don't want to reveal to anyone else my own thought patterns or how luck or the lack of confidence or what I'm actually thinking. I don't know what's going on in their minds exactly. But we do know, based on studies whose outcomes are known, like with the physicians. And we can see the mergers and acquisitions because we know whether companies are profitable or not. We can also see marriages, whether people divorce or not, that people tend to make a great deal of bad decisions. And the more important the decision is, the less likely they are to talk to others.

Gotcha. Okay, so that's how you make a bad decision, is you don't ask for any help. You jump in overconfident or underconfident, whatever the case may be, and you, you just make a gut level decision. Is that what you're saying?

Yes, that's very often. That's most often how you make a wrong decision. The essential point of it is that when you feel comfortable with something and when that goes with what you would like to see happen, and when all the information seems to align with it, that's the time when you need to be especially suspicious because likely your gut is going to steer you in the wrong direction. You need to go outside of your comfort zone. You need to grow personally and say, hey, I might be wrong. About this. You need to develop that humility and be able to take more effective steps and just question your decision at that point. There is of course, techniques to make the right decisions and in the right way. But when that's the time to be suspicious. When your gut is telling you that.

That'S so interesting because what you're saying is almost the opposite of what so many people say. You know, they say, trust your gut, go with your gut instinct, do what you feel is right, and you're probably going to be right. And that's almost the opposite of what you're saying. You're 6% right if you go with your gut.

That's right. We tend to be greatly overconfident if we go on complex decisions with our gut. We. We tend to get them wrong very often, just like those physicians got them wrong. So what I'm saying is actually based on the data, what those people are saying is based on what's comfortable. Now people very often just do what's comfortable to them. Now imagine if somebody was telling you do the most comfortable thing. If a physical trainer was telling you to eat a dozen donuts, that's very comfortable. You know, it's very nice, it feels good, but it's not actually going to get you fit. Or what if a doctor is telling you your medicine is to sit on the couch all day and watch tv, that's not going to help you. But that's the state of where our business and professional decision making is. That's the state of decision making science. It's at the stage of snake oil, where snake oil was in medicine about 100 years ago. We are only at the beginning stages of discovering how do you actually make the right decisions using the research on this topic? Just like a hundred years ago, we were in the beginning stages of discovering what is the actually medically correct thing to do. Not drink the snake oil.

So now take us through where the current thinking is for making the right decision.

So there are two techniques. One is a technique you should use for everyday daily decision making. It's asking five questions that to avoid decision disasters. So I'll tell you the five questions to avoid decision disasters. And that's the everyday technique. Then there's a more complex technique for major decisions like getting married, mergers and acquisitions, major project, major hire, moving your house, or something like that. First, what important information that are not yet fully considered? Again, what important evidence that I'm not yet fully taken into account. You want to especially look for information that goes against your intuitions that that you're uncomfortable with. Try to prove that your preferred choice is wrong. If you can't prove that your preferred choice is wrong, it's much more likely to be correct. But what you don't want to do is just cherry pick evidence to support your preferred choice, which is overwhelmingly what our gut does when we just learn the wild. That's one. Second, what dangerous judgment errors, cognitive biases that are not here address. So there are over 100 of them. You can look them up on Wikipedia. My book Never go with how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters goes for the 30 most dangerous ones for professional activities and how you can effectively address them. Third, what would a trusted and objective advisor suggest? I do think of someone who you trust, someone who's objective from the situation, not involved in it, and think, what would they do? We get about 50% of the benefit just by taking ourselves out of our heads and saying, what would this person do? And the other 50% of the benefit, of course, is if you call this person, or if you're a millennial, text this person.

Next, how have I addressed all the ways this could fail? Imagine that this decision fails, utterly, completely fails. Consider all the reasons why it might have failed. What are all the causes for failure, and then see what you can do in advance to address this failure. So, for example, a marriage might fail because people don't talk about money. That's often a big problem. They don't get on the same page about money in advance, and that causes a marriage to fail. Merger and acquisition often fails. The most common reason is that you look at the external finances, the products. You don't look at the internal culture and the system of what's going on in the organization. So that's a very common reason for failure. And you can do that. You can look in advance at the internal culture of an organization and. And you can talk in advance to your partner about money. So you can do things to solve problems in advance. The other thing you can do is if an unexpected issue come up, try to come up right now with a plan of what you will do to address it. If you have a plan, you're much more likely to succeed in addressing the problem rather than if you try to come up with a plan at the moment when the problem arises next. And finally, what new information would cause me to revisit this decision again? What new evidence would cause you to change your mind? It's very hard for us to actually consider evidence effectively when we're implementing the decision. We're too Emotionally attached to it. Our emotions really feel that this was the right decision. It's very hard for us to change our minds. But if we decide in advance that this specific new information would cause me to change my mind, revisit this decision, that makes it much more effective. So, for example, let's say you're launching a new product and you say If I hit $450,000 in revenue in six months, that would be great. That means everything's going hunky dory. If I don't hit that, that means it's time to really seriously revise my product and launch plan. So that's the way that you can use this, have specific new information that would cause you to revisit this decision. That's something I talked through in a couple of minutes. That's something you can easily institute for every decision making process. And interesting thing, there was a study done on firefighters in the UK, found that about 80% of their errors in firefighting came from human error. So they got firefighters to ask three questions. Firefighting leaders to ask themselves three questions before they went into a fire, because five questions are too many in the heat of the moment when you're fighting a fire, literally. So they asked themselves three questions and they found that these greatly reduced their decision making problems. And at the same time, it didn't actually take them any longer. Once a couple of months passed and they started, they made it part of their mental habit. They compared firefighters who were using these three questions to those who weren't. They were making decisions about the same rate, just as quickly and many less errors. For those who were using the free questions, you can use these five questions, make many less errors and make decisions about the same speed.

So what were the three questions it.

Was having to do specifically with firefighting? Kind of thinking about your goals, your resources and so on. So it's pretty similar, but a little bit narrower and specific.

So it sounds like what you're saying is become the devil's ad when you got to make a decision, become the devil's advocate first and then find out all the ways you could fail, all the ways you would need to rethink it, and then find out what somebody who you trust would say to you or advise you about before you actually pull the trigger.

Yes. And then you're much more likely to succeed with this decision, because if you addressed all the ways that could fail and if you get feedback from an external advisor, you consider other information and so on, then you're much more likely to succeed with the decision. That you take.

So decision making is a big challenge for a lot of people, me included. In fact, when I go into a restaurant to try to figure out what the heck to order, there's 30 choices on the menu, and I've never eaten there before. It's really hard for me to figure out what to order, because my why is to find a better way and share it. And so if I look at something and I say, well, if I pick that one, this other one over here might be better, how am I going to know which one's the best one to order? And so how would you help somebody? Everybody, by the way, everybody with the why of better way struggles with making decisions. So how would you help somebody? Let's just take that scenario. I go into a restaurant, I sit down, I look at the menu. There's a 30 choices that I've never eaten before. How do I figure out what to order?

Sure. An easy one that has to do with question one. What important information did I not yet fully consider? You want to think about what information is actually important to you. You don't want to look at all the choices. You want to look at what is important to you. And if the important thing is to make a choice within a minute and cut off all the other choices, that's a relatively easy thing to do. You can do something like ask the waiter for their favorite food or pre decide that this is the kind of style of food that you want to order. You want to narrow. Basically, you want to narrow your decision making and not keep gathering more information that you don't need. So there is a specific cognitive bias called information bias, where we tend to gather more information than we need for a decision. A decision on what food you're going to order is a decision about what kind of what will cause you the most pleasure and the most healthy outcomes, whatever you're going for at the moment. And so you want to use that and just make the decision in a certain limited amount of time. So that's a good approach to it. The other thing to remember, and this is a really important one, there was a really interesting study done on students who were given the opportunity, college students, they were given the opportunity to make photos. And then two of those photos that they chose they liked best were made into art posters. Then one group of these students was told, choose one of these art posters, take it home, it's yours. The other group of students was told, choose one of these two art posters, take it home. But if you want to change your mind a week from within the next week, you can change your mind. Then. The study evaluated their happiness. The first group you would think of, the first group would be less happy because they don't have the opportunity to change their mind. Actually, the first group was much happier because they cut off their options and they weren't second guessing themselves. So the thing to do there, the lesson is don't second guess yourself. Use the question 5 is specifically there to help you prevent second guessing yourself. What new information would cause me to revisit this decision? You're not going to get new information about these other food options. So don't second guess yourself. Just make a decision and commit to it. That question really helps you make sure that you stay committed to a course of action and go full steam ahead without needing to all the time reconsider and rethink it.

Yeah, I really like what you said there, Gleb, because that is a big challenge. Is. I mean, I like that study that the ones that were not given a second choice just moved on to something else. But the ones that were given an option to trade it in later or change their decision later, stew on it for that whole time. And should I? Should I not? Is it better? Is it not Drives you crazy?

Yep, exactly. So that's why what you want to do is use that fifth question to address it. What new information would cause me to revisit this decision? In this case, the people who were making the choice, they wouldn't get any new information about this decision. So they should not revisit this decision. They should just make the commitment and go. So if you are the person in the second group of the study using these five questions, you can be just as happy as the people in the first study because you would not change your mind.

One of the things that I worked with this company, it was one of the largest venture capital firms back in Baltimore, and they brought some of their board members. And one of their board members was this gentleman who is a billionaire and started the largest venture capital firm in the world. And he has the same why as I do A Better Way. And I asked him one day about how he was able to make decisions because it's such a challenge for people with the why of better way. And he said what he does, which is similar to what you talked about, was he takes, let's just use the same sandwich or menu item in a restaurant analogy. He says, what I do is I quickly go in and I narrow it down to three choices. And once I'm at three choices, I can figure it out from there. But if I got 30 choices, there's no way I can figure that out. And then I give myself a time limit.

Time limit.

I got 30 seconds to make the decision and once I've made that decision, I'm done with it.

Yep, that's great. That's what we're talking about. Exactly. You don't want to reconsider it because you don't get new information and you want to not consider information that's not important. Don't consider all the sides that are coming with it or something like that. Have a limited amount of time. Make the decision in that time.

I love it. I love it. So you said there was another way to figure out. I'm sure there's people listening to the podcast that are in the throes of love and they're trying to figure out if they should get married or not. And there's other people that are trying to figure out if they should merge or acquire another business that are listening to this. What is your advice for those bigger, more challenging decisions?

For bigger, more challenging decisions that will really have a serious impact on your business, on your life, on your career? You know, if you want to change job, you need to use a longer, more thorough eight step process. First, identify the need for decision to be made. Identify. A lot of people miss the time for a decision making process to be made. A lot of people, for example, stay in a relationship much longer than they should and you know, they will be happier. And the person they're with honestly would have been happier if they left the relationship a while ago. That's an example. Or if they left a job that they're not satisfied with. That's often people miss the opportunity to make that choice. They don't identify when they need to make the decision. Next, gather relevant information from variety of people with expertise on the issue at hand. So again, go to other people, get their perspectives. Don't only trust yourself. Don't only trust your intuitions, whether it's getting married or whether it's merging, then decide on the goals you want to reach, see what the outcome is. So if you want to get married, paint the picture of how you will live together in your mind and that way you can see if something is missing. So if you didn't talk about money, which is one of the biggest causes of people separating, then you will want to make sure to get on the same page about money or with the mergers and acquisitions I mentioned, what is the internal culture in the organization. Next, develop clear decision making criteria to evaluate options. So what are the various reasons or decision making criteria that would cause you to marry somebody or to not marry them, or to have a merger with a company or not merge? Next, generate viable options that can achieve your goals. Now, if you're getting married, you're usually not going to have more than one option. But if you are, you know, two options, get married or not. But if you are making another major decision, like let's say choosing among three possible jobs that you're applying for, major jobs that will really change your career, you have a number of options. Then, same thing with mergers, acquisitions, you'll likely have a number of options. Or if you're moving to a new place, you likely have a number of options. Weigh these options and pick the best of the bunch. Use the decision making criteria to weigh these options. So consider the decision making criteria, how important each of the criteria is to you and how well each of the options ranks on it. Next, implement the options you choose. As part of that, think about what would happen, why this option might fail. So imagine it completely fails and imagine all the reasons why it might fail, how you can address them in advance. Now, there's an additional component for major decisions. Imagine that this option completely succeeds, that it's opt that it's excellent. Think about all the reasons for why it succeeded. Why did your marriage succeed, what does it mean for it to succeed? Of course. Then why did it succeed? How can you make sure it succeeds? How did the new job succeed, make sure it succeeds, how does the merger succeed? And so on. Finally, evaluate the implementation process. Make sure you measure it. Measure to make sure that it actually does what you want it to, and revise it as needed. So if the marriage is not working out, you might want to go to a marriage counselor, you might not be. You might want to go to a marriage counselor if the new job is not working out. Consider what you can do about that. Same thing about the merger and acquisition. You might want to change things around as you're doing the merger and acquisitions. So that's the eight step process for major, major decisions.

You know what's really great about that is you've systematized the process. And I've been through a scenario where I had to make some challenging decisions and I had a friend of mine work through some, not exactly your steps, but a few steps. And the key is actually to do it right. I mean, the key is to spend the time and do each step so that when the decision comes, you're prepared.

Yes, absolutely. Because if you don't do each step. If you try to skip steps and so on, take shortcuts, you're just harming yourself in the end. This is a major decision. This is something that would seriously impact your career, your personal life, your business. You need to take the time and effort to make sure that you get it right and you don't want to screw around on this.

How often are you able to get people to do all the steps? Like you said, I'm sure the tendency is to just say, okay, I looked at them, I kind of got it. I think I'm okay.

When I work with, as a consultant coach, when I work with people, I make sure that they go through all the steps because that's what they hire me to do. You know, they're not going to pay me all this money and, and then not have me hold them accountable. Otherwise I'm not going to work with someone because even if they pay me money, if they're not going to take it seriously, I'm just not going to work with this person. So someone who just reads my book, I mean, I can't control what they do. But it's certainly better to know the steps and to at least try some of them than to not do anything at all. But when I work with people, I definitely make sure that they go through all these steps for major processes and that they ask the five questions to. For everyday decisions that they don't want to screw up.

So how did you come up with these five step and eight step processes? How did that happen for you?

Oh, that's, I mean, it's easy. I looked at the research and I looked at what are the common, what are the most effective debiasing strategies? How do we actually address the cognitive biases that really cause us a lot of problems? And for example, let's talk about the five questions. The first one, what important information did I not yet fully consider? We tend to not consider alternative explanations and options, whereas that's one of the most effective ways of debiasing ourselves. So considering the alternative is a really important way to address these problems. So considering things that go against our intuitions or what would a trusted and objective advisor suggest I do, that's the strategy in debiasing. In the literature on the biasing, the scholarship or of an external perspective. Getting an external perspective from other people has been shown to be incredibly helpful. Getting an external perspective from ourselves. That's why I was saying we get at least half the benefit if we just ask ourselves this question and think it through is very Helpful, because what we're basically doing is taking ourselves out of our own shoes and looking at the situation more objectively. So, for example, if mergers and acquisitions fail at a rate, there is a difference between the internal perspective and the external perspective. Internally, I might feel that this merger is going to be awesome. This is great. I love this company. They love me. We really get along. We align. Great. That's the internal perspective. Now, from an external perspective, you know that mergers and acquisitions fail at the rate of 80%. So all of these people who think that this is a great merger, all the other people who think that they're not dumb, all the other business leaders who are doing mergers, they also think things will work out, otherwise they won't enter into this merger. So therefore, you have to be much more skeptical of your intuitions and their intuitions and say, hey, I know other people have been in the same position that I am. Same thing with marriage. People don't get married with the intention of divorcing, but they divorce at very high rates. So you want to be skeptical of yourself and your intentions and your intuitions and be much more humble about your accuracy and then take a lot of steps to ensure that you prevent failure. So that's kind of the external perspective. So that that's. And all the other ones are the same way. I took the debiasing strategies and formed them into questions that people could ask themselves.

So you took things that worked, have been shown to work by research, and you put them together in a way that is the right way to make a decision.

That's exactly right. That's what I did. And I also tested it with my own clients for. I've been doing this consulting coaching for a while before I actually published them in book form to make sure that they work.

Yeah. So if people read your book or hire you as their coach, they can be sure that what you tell them is going to be the right way to get things to make the correct decision.

Yes, it's going to be at the cutting edge of the research. Now, that doesn't mean that there won't be a study tomorrow that that will show that one of these questions means a tweak. I can't guarantee that, but it's going to be the cutting edge of what we know now about what works. It definitely works. Something might work better and just going to be humble and say that this is not the last word. Because the awesomeness of science is that it can show that previous things that we thought were the best way might not be the best way, and they can be improved.

So have you always been somebody that looks for processes and systems and things that get results?

Absolutely. This has been something that I've been very oriented towards my whole life that I've been trying to figure out what are the best ways to do something, not simply accomplish the thing, but what's the best way to get the thing done and how do I make myself as productive and effective as possible in achieving certain outcomes. So that's been something I've always been passionate about.

So are structure, processes, systems important to you?

Very much so, yes. They're critical to me. And this is what? Partially because if we just go. I know that if I go with my natural intuitive, I would not get stuff done, not nearly as much stuff done as I would if I follow structure, if I follow process. And this is the case for everybody. If they follow structure, if they follow these processes, these five questions and whatever, they would get much more done. Unfortunately, many people don't. They feel that this is not the right thing to do. They feel that they would. That their natural intuitive state is better. And you know, you have the same thing happen as people who feel that they can naturally, intuitively eat whatever they want. And you get that beast epidemic in the United States as a result and everywhere around the world. So, yeah.

So how much structure? So now let's focus on. So avoiding disaster is one of the things that you do. It's one of the ways in your life where you have applied the why of right way.

Yes.

So how much now I'd love to kind of get your perspective on how much is enough, how much of doing, following process, system, structures is enough? When is enough enough?

I would say that depends on individual personalities. There's certain areas where we definitely know we need to follow structures and processes to succeed, such as business. In business, if you don't follow structure, if you don't follow processes, you're really not going to succeed. That's kind of a basic given that applies to all aspects of business for everyone. So that's fundamentally important. In some aspects of life, structure and process is going to be less important. Some people, there's going to be a very small amount of people who naturally eat healthy. If they eat whatever they want, they will eat in a healthy manner. That's going to be a very small percentage of people. But they don't need structure and process to eat more healthy. Now other people will want a moderate amount of structure and process. They'll say, you know, I should not keep sweets at home. But I'll eat whatever I want when I go out to the restaurant. That works for them, that's fine. So they, that works for them very well. Other people need pre prepared meals for everything. Otherwise they will just be obese and they will have really bad health. And that's what works for them. So that depends on each person's tendencies and personalities. That depends on what kind of cognitive biases they're vulnerable to. So for example, myself, I am very vulnerable to the optimism bias. That means that I tend to be way too optimistic about outcomes. I tend to be risk blind. I tend to underestimate threats, overestimate opportunities and rewards. So I think everything is green on the other side of the hill, whereas often it's actually the grass is actually yellow on the other side of the hill. So I know that about myself and that applies to all areas of my life, my business, my relationships, my health and everything like that. So I need to compensate for that in all areas of my life. And I need to impose structure to ensure that all of my activities have a sufficient correction for optimism through application of pessimistic structures. So that's kind of a approach that applies to me because of my personality and my needs.

Excellent. You know, it's fascinating for. So there's nine different whys. And one of those whys is to challenge the status quo and think differently. And those people do not like structure in any way. You can't put them in a box, you can't make them follow a recipe. They're going to do it their own way no matter what. Even if you try to impose structure on them, they're going to throw in a couple wrinkles of their own. Now they're not good at necessarily getting things done, but they're great at creating extraordinary stuff. Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Herb Kelleher, they're all outside the box, challenge the status quo. People that have done incredible things, but they don't believe in structure as far as a thinking process. They know they need it, but they don't want to follow it. Does that make sense?

It makes sense. And there are going to be people who, who are like that, Leonardo da Vinci and so on. From historical perspectives, they're going to be the lone isolated geniuses. The vast majority of us are not Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci. And we need to be much more humble. So that's kind of the base rate. There might be people who are phenomenally successful at doing mergers and acquisitions. They might succeed at every one of them, but 80% of mergers and acquisitions still fail. That means that you need to be supremely humble about your own ability and compensate for that intuitive overconfidence and arrogance that accompanies our gut intuitions. So don't think that you're Steve Jobs, just like the vast majority of people who try to be pro football players are not going to be Tom Brady.

Yes, exactly.

You need to understand that and use structure. And even these thinkers, Steve Jobs and so on, he wouldn't have survived and done anything if he didn't have the structure of, of Apple around him. Right. That's a huge conglomerate corporate structure. And honestly, you, the listener, is much more likely to be part of the structure of Apple, you know, the. How many hundreds of thousands people work there than you're going to be Steve Jobs.

Yeah, you know, I like the way you said that. I like that humility is what leads to the need for structure. And that's really powerful in thinking about that because you need a certain number of, I don't know if you want to call it beatdowns or whatever. You need to get beat up enough times to figure up, figure out, huh? This no structure way that I'm doing it is not going to work for me right now. I need to find out what is going to work. And that's where somebody would seek out a coach like yourself to be able to help them to create the structure that they aren't able to do.

That's right. And ideally, these people who hear this podcast would actually learn this lesson from the mistakes of others, which is kind of what I've been talking about this whole time. You don't need to get all of these beatdowns yourself. You can actually learn from others and say, hey, this is what the research shows. Mergers and acquisitions don't work nearly as well as I intuitively think they do. Marriages and so on don't work nearly as well as I intuitively think they do. Maybe I should be a little bit more humble and not do try mergers and acquisitions without actually evaluating the situation, being much more skeptical, using these methods and so on so you can learn from the mistakes of others, folks. You don't have to get all of these beat downs yourself.

Well, Gleb, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast with me today. If you, if there's people out there that want to get ahold of you, they want to talk to you about creating structure, avoiding disasters, how should they get ahold of you?

Well, it's very easy to get a hold of the book. It's available in bookstores everywhere. It's physical bookstore that's been published by traditional publisher, great business publisher, Career Press. So whether you go to Barnes Noble University Bookstore, props to indie bookstores, check those out. And of course, online on Amazon, Barnes Noble and everywhere else. If you want to get in touch with me, go to Disaster Avoidance Experts. Com again, Disaster Avoidance Experts. Com. There's blogs, there's articles, videos, podcasts, resources on consulting, coaching manuals. There's a store there. And of course, use the contact form there to get in touch with me. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Gleb Tziporski. So G L E B T S I P U R S K Y. I can guarantee to you there's nobody else on LinkedIn with that name.

Finally, on Twitter, Glebzypursky. Follow me there.

That's awesome. Hey, Gleb, thank you so much for being here. Really enjoyed our conversation. Now I've got a structure and a process for helping me make all these challenging decisions that I've got myself. So thank you very much for that.

You're very welcome, Gary. And thanks so much for inviting me on the podcast.

Have a great day.

You too.

It.